News Roundup: New Intel Hardware, the EU Picks on Apple, and More

Intel releases energy-efficient Xeon: Intel released a pair of new 50-watt quad-core Xeon processors. Previous Xeon quads ran at 80- and 120-watts, so there's a significant power savings. The Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor L5320 runs at 1.86GHz, while the L5310 runs at 1.6GHz. Both processors have an 8MB cache and run on 1.06GHz front side buses. No word yet from Apple as to when these muscular processors will make their way into the Mac Pro, but our guess is sooner rather than later.

Intel's new storage devices: Intel also announced new solid-state drives. The drives are based on NAND flash memory with USB interfaces. According to Intel's press release, "The drives will also be used in a variety of Intel-based computing platforms, such as servers, emerging market notebooks and low-cost, fully featured PCs," which should add more fuel to the rumors of a flash-based Apple notebook.

The European Union calls Apple out: Boy, those Europeans are sure worked up over the iPod and iTunes. In a German magazine called Focus, European Union consumer chief Meglena Kuneva demanded that Apple open iTunes to devices other than the iPod. If you understand German, you can read the Focus article. If you don't know German, you can use Google's translation to read an English translation, but it's up to you to make sense of the translation - "Finding it it in order that CD runs on all CD-Playern, International Telecommunication Union it Song however only on one iPod? I not. Such a thing must change." Huh?

Apple pushes its iTunes weight around: According to a Wall Street Journal article, Apple uses its iTunes promotional space to get exclusive content, special pricing, and more. Apparently, those iTunes promotional spaces work, increasing sales of items featured in those spaces.

Comments

Dave S

March 14, 2007 at 10:38am

I posted a letter on my [new] blog, Walk the Lion, to policy makers around the world, detailing just why Apple's DRM is nothing to be concerned about, from a simple end-user point of view. Check it out.

Preview - if you can go from iTunes to CD in one step, you can do anything with the music that you could if you bought it from the record store.

WalkTheLion.wordpress.com

- Dave

Ben

March 12, 2007 at 12:19pm

Germans and those order word and thier crazy.

Was I surprised even that lockSher up the translation messed.

But what the German's don't understand, is that here in the US [and around the world-I'm assuming], we don't usually like to have "International Telecommunication Unions" running on our iPods :]